puzzling.org

Apparently, text messages (SMSs) sent in Australia are stored by the telco for a few days and searches can be (and probably are being) carried out for messages containing certain content.

Nominations for the Australian blog awards are open. (The authority is self-appointed, but that’s OK. I set myself up as an authority on everything I can think of too.)

Best Australian tech blog. Last year I nominated Martin Pool, but it didn’t really get anywhere. (I think ‘popular tech blog’ usually corresponds to ‘person who blogs about Cascading Style Sheets a lot’ rather than ‘person who blogs about source control a lot’.) Martin hasn’t been writing very much this year and I don’t want to nominate him on past glories. I’d make an effort for the free software community, but none of the writers on Planet Linux Australia really stand out for me yet.

Best Australian Political Blog/Best Australian Collaborative Blog. This would be Larvatus Prodeo for me. I wish they had a less shrill set of commenters though. I keep hoping one day I’ll stumble on an Aussie Unfogged (one of the very very few blogs where more than 0.1% of the comment threads are worth reading), but it hasn’t happened yet. I keep meaning to commit to reading Andrew Bartlett regularly too, but I haven’t so I don’t know if he’s a contender.

Best Overseas Australian Blog. Surely I’m not the only person who loves Rachel Chalmers’ Yatima. Surely? Her whole family is my blog crush.

In categories they don’t have, here’s some others, from closer to home:

• Art blogging: Abstraktn
• Grog blogging/cranky blogging: Julia
• Bitchy teen blogging: Steph (get it while it’s hot, she’s turning 20 next year)

She’s a little bulky:

If I’d really appreciated this prior to purchase I might have spent a little bit more money on getting a real wrist computer, not a console computer in a wrist mount. But that’s OK, it can wait until I retire this one some years from now.

And yes, my wrists are quite slender. This wrist strap is actually a pain to get off when it’s that tight, fortunately I will normally be wearing it over my other baby:

The new one’s also a little crazy:

That’s saying that if I were to dive now (currently at sea level with no previous dives in the last couple of days) I could spend 5 minutes at 57 metres depth before it would insist noisily on my taking decompression stops during ascent. And it’s also assuming that I’m at least 70% completely crazy. I can’t say I have a great sense of my tolerance of nitrogen pressure, but I’m presuming that would be lala land: nearly 4 martinis by Martini’s law.

Things that suck

• Quickflix, because the last three DVDs they’ve sent us were faulty. (Actually, the two copies of Dr Strangelove might have been the same disk.) Double suck for the Fargo DVD being faulty in the last fifth.
• The thread starting here. Just looking at it in all its threadly glory will give you an idea.
• Stimulants. I can run on caffeine and pseudoephedrine when ill, but they both make me feel kind of hyper-well, so I drive myself into the wall and only find out when the effects wear off.
• Andrew’s machine’s BIOS which not only won’t work with USB keyboards (recall, he has no working PS/2 ports) but which also periodically fails to give him a usable mouse.
• Laptop prices in Australia. Let’s review one culprit, the IBM T series direct from Lenovo. In the US, it starts at $1 399. In Canada, it starts at $1 499 (US$1270 or so). In Australia, it’s $2 599 (US $1920 or so). Yeah. I can’t work this one out. I’m not exactly taking advantage of economies of scale when I point out that it would cost me about $100 to ship one from the US.
• Stores that don’t put the price on things above a certain price. I mean, if I have to ask, which I’m disinclined to because then I’ll get a sales pitch and I tend to do my consumer research before hitting a store, it’s not like the mere fact of having to ask will make me more likely to pay a huge amount for something. SCUBA stores are a bit weird about this. They’ll happily show off a new $3999 set as their top-end kit for the season or three (I’m talking rec diving here), but they’ll never ever put a price on a wrist computer, which tend to be about $500-$600 in Australia. (See above re laptops for the weird price differences from North America.) Camera stores are more consistent. C’mon, it’s not like I don’t know the current price range for low-end DSLRs, I just want to know if you’re selling at RRP or not.

Things that rock

• I just experienced my first ever hard-drive failure. Fortunately, not only was everything important to me backed up, I also found the sole remaining copy of my GPG secret key after hunting through several household computers.
• LeisurePro, who have just shipped me my new baby, despite being a bit dubious about a non-US card, and my initially giving them the wrong expiry date. First person to rip them off with an unjustified chargeback on a foreign card, you will feel the back of my hand.

I hear about software rotting a lot, but not a lot about hardware rot. But rot it does. No sooner had Andrew and I got back to Australia about this time last year (354 days ago, actually) and slowly but surely coaxed our desktops back to life over the course of a week or so of patiently reseating cables and whacking them hard on the side, it seemed, did we moved house (five and a half months ago) and somehow destroy them again.

Being laptop enabled, I didn’t find this out until I wanted a Windows machine to do my tax return. Booting my old faithful produced nothing more than a loud and upsetting pop. My intimidating hardware acumen lead me inevitably to diagnose some kind of bang in the motherboard thingie. Or actually, probably in the power supply, because it smelled weirder. (On a tangent, I still count the day that I showed my father how to plug the CD-ROM back into the motherboard and the adventure went to his head and he ended up taking the case’s power supply apart and carefully vacuuming it as one of the odder experiences in my life. Thanks for the memories Dad.)

So then I tried Andrew’s slightly less faithful desktop only to find that it booted into a completely broken Windows 98 install by default and couldn’t be fixed because it didn’t work with PS/2 keyboards anymore, so the BIOS is uneditable.

So I did my tax return on paper and resigned myself to using up perfectly good airspace in our house by filling it with completely useless computers (I’ve never worked out how to dispose of computer bits). And that was all fine and good until Andrew’s laptop was stolen and we were down a computer, a key element of our lifestyle. Surely between two broken desktops we could put together one working machine? Unfortunately, neither has such an accessible setup anymore: my BIOS is kaput, his is not editable. But we eventually did it by shoving the hard drive in another machine.

Incidentally, a big boo-hiss to Ubuntu for requiring a key-press to boot their live CD (apparently, Andrew was the one who waited for it, but not me). Andrew’s BIOS doesn’t like USB keyboards, so he needed an operating system that could be booted with no key-presses.

I’ve had several discussions recently with people interested in the why-so-few-women-FOSS-developers problem (pimp: it’s a problem talked about a lot now, got links for the bibliography I maintain?) specifically as it relates to LinuxChix. The general starting position is this: where is LinuxChix in the creation of Free Software? Well, while individual members are here and there, that tends not to have much to do with their participation in LinuxChix. LinuxChix is a user and social community, and further, it doesn’t seem to ‘graduate’ a lot of people into the big bad world of FOSS development. (Note that some chapters, particularly LinuxChix Brazil, operate pretty differently.)

This has come up in a few places online. I don’t know if Fernanda Weiden was thinking about LinuxChix when she wrote this, but it’s a good match for some of the more negative opinions:

That’s the role of the women’s groups, to offer a friendly interface for women to get their feet wet and then join the community. The problem is when these groups don’t have a clear target, in the end they turn in Barbie worlds that don’t exist in reality. Instead of integrating the women into the community, they serve as ghettos, re-creating existing groups in the community with the only objective being more friendly for women.

Máirín Duffy writes:

LinuxChix gets a lot of mention in the essay is referred to as being an open source development community, but I feel quite strongly that it is not. Some of the motivation behind my pushing for GNOME Women was borne out of frustration with LinuxChix. LinuxChix is really more of a Linux User’s Group (LUG) than an actual development community.

I raised this on a LinuxChix list today and got an interesting response from Carla Schroder. To paraphrase greatly, the upshot was that Carla draws a distinction between not being an open source development community, which pretty much everyone agrees that LinuxChix is not, and not being an activist community.

LinuxChix is pretty broad brush, but some of the things it is active in are: providing a forum for answering technical questions from women and providing skills education to women. And that’s only the more formal stuff. Behind the scenes, there’s a long tradition of discussing technical careers and related things (interviews, salaries) and working on giving women recognition for their technical accomplishments (within the community, mostly). Carla also pointed out that while there aren’t masses of FOSS developers emerging from the community there are quite a lot of women technical writers and a huge number of women sysadmins who’ve derived a substantial chunk of their career launch from LinuxChix help. It’s not a ‘ghetto’ in that sense.

LinuxChix is not active politically, and it’s not a development community. (It helps coders, but it doesn’t have a coherent project.) It does suffer from being seen as the one-stop-shop for women-in-FOSS when it’s actually not doing some things that women would like to do and it’s particularly not doing work to produce women FOSS developers. But that doesn’t mean it should be mistaken for a sheltered workshop, it just means there’s a difference between reality and publicity that could use some work on one direction or the other.

I need to pay more attention to DebSIG I think. How did I miss Conrad Parker on What can Free Software teach Free Media? This is what comes of being the only geek in Sydney who doesn’t like beer or pubs, I guess.

I’m really enjoying Bazaar 2.0 as compared to GNU Arch. There’s a lot of things I could say about Bazaar 2.0 as version control, but let’s leave it as ah, that’s why I originally liked the idea of distributed version control.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have something more pressing to communicate! Bazaar 1.0 has a commandline program baz, pronounced like the first syllable of bazaar (I note in passing that until I saw that commandline, I thought that it was called ‘bizarre’ and am still disappointed). Bazaar 2.0 will have bzr. Now, people, you can’t seriously be expecting me to pronounce the latter as bazaar can you? C’mon, … try saying it. bzr. bzr. BZR. It doesn’t quite have the Australian neutral vowel in it, but I’m determined and ready to fight for it to be pronounced buzzer. You can have all kinds of really nerdy jokes about hitting the buzzer. Now get with the program.

Rusty Russell is not happy about John Quiggin’s embrace of Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License as a kind of a good default for allowing other people use of your creative work.

Russell slams Quiggin:

That Quiggin takes this path despite training as an ecomonist [sic, original author’s emphasis] demonstrates either a lack of deep thought on this issue, or that he uses economics to justify his leftist dogma, rather than to examine issues. (This paragraph was about as polite as I could make it).

I can’t say that I’m too much of a fan of the phrase “leftist dogma.” It’s about as meaningful to me as saying “fropbutz dogma” — ie I tend to prefer attacks on political positions on a particular issue rather than attacks on them because of other political positions that they’ve been known to be associated with. (What are the pragmatics of the word ‘leftist’? I read it as having exclusively hostile connotations, that is, that a position or group of positions is only described as ‘leftist’ — as opposed to ‘left’, ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ — by people who oppose it.) To be fair, this is what the rest of Russell’s piece does, I’m just having a go at the ‘leftist’ ending.

But that wasn’t what struck me enough to write an entry about it. I was struck more by the emphasised part: “despite training as an economist”. This strikes me as a cutting line indeed. Quiggin’s relationship to economics isn’t that he trained in it: it’s that he is an economist. Russell is implying that his economic positions would be foolish from someone with an undergraduate major. It would be like saying that Russell is a remarkably bad coder for someone who’s met a few kernel developers.